200ms input lag is huge. Really huge. The sort of amount that makes you feel like your computer is about to die. Bear in mind this isn't network lag, this is the amount of time it takes to react to your mouse moving, to change your direction with mouselook, etc.
Supposedly it might get better the bigger connection you have. However, if you have a 5-10M connection as they recommend, it's simpler and probably quicker to download the whole game off Steam, or a torrent or whatever.
The only way I can see this working is for people with very high quality net connections, and no decent rigs to run the games on (just enough to stream the audio/video). I'm not an expert but that seems a very specific and counterintuitive demographic.
I think it's mostly to do with the emphasis on characters between movies and games. In movies, the main tension is usually between two or more actors, whether romantic, action or whatever. In games, it's mostly the protagonist (who is mute and often faceless) against the environment. If characters do feature, they are mostly accessories rather than antagonists.
A great example is the Doom game/movie - for the most part of the game, it is simply the main guy exploring, fighting, and cool things and monsters going on. If you were to make a movie of just that, it could be pretty good, however there would be little to no dialogue, it's essentially the story of one guy exploring the base and fighting things. However, Hollywood does not know how to make a movie like that.
So, a sub-plot with characters is shoe-horned into the environment. This is generally done by people who haven't played the game, or more specifically, they don't understand what games and gaming is like. Of course this is a pig's breakfast, just as a movie made by games developers would be (Final Fantasy comes to mind - looks like a great game, absolutely terrible acting and one-dimensional characterisation)
Things are converging, however - the more recent game movies are better than the old ones (Mario & Luigi? Streetfighter?), and games are become more movie-like with stronger characters and interaction. However, ultimately they are different mediums, and just as translating a book into a movie (or vice versa) takes experience in both fields, moving between games and movies is a non-trivial task and the work should be adapted to fit the medium. A good example is LotR - the books were amended to fit a screenplay/what works in a movie better, and the movies were probably better for it. Not 100% faithful, but they made what was (imho at least) the best possible movie version of that story.
Historically, they make a whole batch of processors together, then run some tests to see how fast each will run. Some go faster than others (or more to the point, some are reliable at higher speeds, some less reliable) so they get divided into different speed batches and sold at different prices.
The reasons behind the reliability are varied, however, and mostly down to heat dissipation. As the chip gets hotter (and they get v hot inside) it gets less reliable. The manufacturer tests against a standard heat diffusion system, but some people will spend more money on good cooling, either a big heatsink and fan, or even water cooling, or down to liquid nitrogen (!). The upshot is, any particular chip will be more reliable at a higher speed.
Sometimes, however, it's just about the market. It may cost $200 to manufacture your product, but some people want to buy a good product at around $300, some want to buy one at $500 and have the best. So you sell your product for $500, but nobble a few (say in firmware) to run a bit slower, and sell those for $300. Overall, you will sell many more that way than just the $500 ones, so you make more money.
This is EXACTLY what happened with the Geforce 6800GTS (If I remember correctly) - they used to manufacture dies with 4 cores on them. If it had 4 cores working, it was a high end model, if it had 3 cores working, it was a low end model. This allowed them to increase yields dramatically, as all the ones with just one fault still sold. However, the market demand for the low end one was far greater than the number of defective parts they had, so they ended up taking the 4-core model, locking one core in firmware and releasing it as a low end model - after all, selling a card at a cheaper price is better than not selling it at all, right?
The upshot was some people could programmatically unlock their 4th core, and get a high end card for low end price! I tried it myself, but had one with a defective 4th core so just got a bunch of video corruption until I locked it again:>
There is a guy who posts this exact message, almost word for word, every time a new CPU or graphics card is announced. "This is useless - I'm a power user and I can get by with a can of tuna and a bit of string".
Well, I'm afraid I have to tell you, you're not a power user, if you don't need the power that is now available. 2005's power user, maybe. But if you want to do video editing (and I mean final cut/premiere, not reencoding your dvd rips), play the latest games etc, then you do need that hardware. That software is designed to run on that hardware. And if you manage your own machine, whether it's for gaming of photoshop or whatever, you're going to care that this thing gives you bang for your buck. for what it's worth, this new chip isn't the fastest available. It isn't even close. It's the best value high-end chip, with a view to become even better value if you're open to overclocking it.
If you're not in that target audience, then fine - why do you complain about it? Do you bitch that lamborghinis are too expensive? "$150,000? I have a ford cortina that I got for $500 and it gets me to the mall just fine!". You don't see there is a market for this, because you are looking at a sample size of 1. Intel and AMD have a multi-billion business riding on this, I for one trust they're going to have done their homework.
(And I'm interested in the chip too - I'm planning a system upgrade soon - first since my Q6600 - and I like high-end, value chips I can overclock!)
I'm afraid you have it backwards - you are saying above that any tablet with Windows 7 must fail. Neither the OS nor, crucially, the market are mature, there will be a lot to come yet.
I gave the points that made the iPad successful - the OS was not important except, obviously, that it is a GOOD OS for the purpose.
You may think Windows 7 does not have the potential to be a good tablet OS - I am not defending it but simply pointing out that given there have been no windows tablets launched on a similar magnitude, that we can't know. The market is so immature - hell, the iPad isn't even released in this country until later this week, how can anyone know how it will end?
This is absolutely disingenuous. Are you saying the only reason the iPad succeeded was that it didn't have Win7 on it?
I mean, if you're operating at that level, you may as well say the iPad succeeded because it was a different colour. Just because they have one thing in common, does not mean that's the reason. Sheesh, never heard of correlation versus causation?
The iPad is successful because:
- it had the Apple hype machine behind it
- sleek, thin design
- large established app base
- good multi-touch screen
- low price point (compared to other slates, at least, and definitely lower than people were anticipating from Apple)
It was nothing to do with Windows 7. Hell, if the iPad DID run Windows 7 and gave a comparable experience, it would still have sold well, for the reasons above.
And all of a sudden, you realise that EVERY car dealership in town has small print saying "...and if you buy this car, we can fuck you in the ass."
Well, you don't like being fucked in the ass. But there are only 3 car dealerships available to you, and they all have this small print in it. And you really need a car.
I work in IT for a government department that is still using IE6 as well. We are actually transitioning to IE8 this very month, the standard laptop/desktop build is being overhauled.
So, these things take a lot of time, but they do get done.
What steps/actions are you going to take, to ensure the UK Pirate Party can emulate the success of the swedish Pirate Party? Have you been in touch with them to discuss their approach, how they gained exposure, and how they managed to rally so many voters to their cause?
Would you mind elaborating on how you'd go about making it fast and reliable for $1K?
Not that I think it can't be done, I think the solution as it is IS reliable, and medium speed, but if you think it can be done better, I'd be interested to hear how.
They announced a few months ago, that all Virgin media's customers will have new boxes with software provided by TiVo, from 2010. That's currently around 4 million customers.
Not sure how this ties up with Virgin's general plans, to roll out faster fiber nationwide. I can't see the point of a PVR when you have enough bandwidth to stream anything on demand.
I work for an organisation that has a private email system (private as in hardware, network lines). SPF works fine on that, though is also redundant. However, the network is accessible to other networks (ie the internet, as in, people can send mail to regular mail addresses, and vice versa), and SPF breaks here.
Due to the jump to the network, the "sender" is always the provider who handles said connectivity, where our area of the private network touches the internet. Thus we've had to completely disable SPF as it always comes back with negative results.
A good idea in principle, but fails when the two mail servers cannot immediately talk to one another. You'd need something like a validation chain to allow that scenario to work.
I remember, before TBC came out, trying to level alts to 5 in under 1 hour. That wasn't too hard, I got it down to about 40 minutes then. Last new character I made was a blood elf, and while I didn't stick around to 10, it was a lot quicker, I remember noticing.
This is a pity as a lot of the early quests, area atmospheres and monsters set the scene for the next progressions. The difference between each starter set, in every race on every faction, made for compelling play and in my opinion was the best part of the game in many cases. It's certainly what held people's interest while they got hooked, so it had to have been doing something right. It'll be a pity to miss that great experience.
Good point, and it would be good if it was so - I think it would still be hard. When I played a year-18 months ago, and was levelling alts, I often couldn't find a single person who wanted to do some of the more obscure ones, for hours on end - Razorfen, anyone?
Any changes to levels below 10 are inconsequential, that's about 3 hours of playtime. Removing the dazing effect and increasing regeneration just helps out new players, and i presume Blizzard is trying to recruit new players/subscriptions rather than just alts.
The meeting stone level requirement is effectively a nod toward boosting - given that low levels go past so quickly now, it's actually quite difficult to find a proper party for a mid level dungeon like maraudon, uldaman or that sort of thing. I guess Blizzard think it better that a new player get boosted through there, rather than miss it altogether.
Damn, I miss when you could get a full party for Scarlet monastery, though. Everything goes fine for the first 2 wings, then the leader switches on master looter for the tabard and hearths out - everyone else ragequits or goes to stormwind and badmouths him. Okay maybe I don't miss that so much.
If you want to play at 60FPS, run it on any hardware released in the last 5 years.
I ran it on a *laptop* from 2002, and it was still playable. Running it on an nVidia 6800 (launched early 2004), it pegged a solid 60FPS in all but the craziest raids.
Thinking you need a 4Ghz CPU to run WoW is ridiculous. Hell, you can probably buy a graphics card that runs it for less than the game itself.
> There is a lot of damage you can do to a minor that does not involve sex, and it's about time adults were responsible to what they knowingly say to minors.
No, it's about time that the child's parents/legal guardians were responsible for what the child is doing, giving them guidance about the world, and shielding them for what they are not prepared for. The internet and everyone else on it is NOT a suitable babysitter for a child, nor should they be expected to be accountable for someone else's poor parenting.
Would you sue a library because a kid left unattanded there picked up some traumatising sexual or horror content from the bookshelves?
This is a huge step backward making the terms of the law incredibly VAGUE, and making much normal, moral and legal behaviour illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
200ms input lag is huge. Really huge. The sort of amount that makes you feel like your computer is about to die. Bear in mind this isn't network lag, this is the amount of time it takes to react to your mouse moving, to change your direction with mouselook, etc.
Supposedly it might get better the bigger connection you have. However, if you have a 5-10M connection as they recommend, it's simpler and probably quicker to download the whole game off Steam, or a torrent or whatever.
The only way I can see this working is for people with very high quality net connections, and no decent rigs to run the games on (just enough to stream the audio/video). I'm not an expert but that seems a very specific and counterintuitive demographic.
WoW wasn't designed to run on barebones PCs, it was reasonably demanding when it first came out. It's just old.
Having said that, I dread to think how it would run on a "business machine" or another without 3d acceleration.
I think it's mostly to do with the emphasis on characters between movies and games. In movies, the main tension is usually between two or more actors, whether romantic, action or whatever. In games, it's mostly the protagonist (who is mute and often faceless) against the environment. If characters do feature, they are mostly accessories rather than antagonists.
A great example is the Doom game/movie - for the most part of the game, it is simply the main guy exploring, fighting, and cool things and monsters going on. If you were to make a movie of just that, it could be pretty good, however there would be little to no dialogue, it's essentially the story of one guy exploring the base and fighting things. However, Hollywood does not know how to make a movie like that.
So, a sub-plot with characters is shoe-horned into the environment. This is generally done by people who haven't played the game, or more specifically, they don't understand what games and gaming is like. Of course this is a pig's breakfast, just as a movie made by games developers would be (Final Fantasy comes to mind - looks like a great game, absolutely terrible acting and one-dimensional characterisation)
Things are converging, however - the more recent game movies are better than the old ones (Mario & Luigi? Streetfighter?), and games are become more movie-like with stronger characters and interaction. However, ultimately they are different mediums, and just as translating a book into a movie (or vice versa) takes experience in both fields, moving between games and movies is a non-trivial task and the work should be adapted to fit the medium. A good example is LotR - the books were amended to fit a screenplay/what works in a movie better, and the movies were probably better for it. Not 100% faithful, but they made what was (imho at least) the best possible movie version of that story.
Also, Uwe Boll can die in a fire.
Historically, they make a whole batch of processors together, then run some tests to see how fast each will run. Some go faster than others (or more to the point, some are reliable at higher speeds, some less reliable) so they get divided into different speed batches and sold at different prices.
The reasons behind the reliability are varied, however, and mostly down to heat dissipation. As the chip gets hotter (and they get v hot inside) it gets less reliable. The manufacturer tests against a standard heat diffusion system, but some people will spend more money on good cooling, either a big heatsink and fan, or even water cooling, or down to liquid nitrogen (!). The upshot is, any particular chip will be more reliable at a higher speed.
Sometimes, however, it's just about the market. It may cost $200 to manufacture your product, but some people want to buy a good product at around $300, some want to buy one at $500 and have the best. So you sell your product for $500, but nobble a few (say in firmware) to run a bit slower, and sell those for $300. Overall, you will sell many more that way than just the $500 ones, so you make more money.
This is EXACTLY what happened with the Geforce 6800GTS (If I remember correctly) - they used to manufacture dies with 4 cores on them. If it had 4 cores working, it was a high end model, if it had 3 cores working, it was a low end model. This allowed them to increase yields dramatically, as all the ones with just one fault still sold. However, the market demand for the low end one was far greater than the number of defective parts they had, so they ended up taking the 4-core model, locking one core in firmware and releasing it as a low end model - after all, selling a card at a cheaper price is better than not selling it at all, right?
The upshot was some people could programmatically unlock their 4th core, and get a high end card for low end price! I tried it myself, but had one with a defective 4th core so just got a bunch of video corruption until I locked it again :>
There is a guy who posts this exact message, almost word for word, every time a new CPU or graphics card is announced. "This is useless - I'm a power user and I can get by with a can of tuna and a bit of string".
Well, I'm afraid I have to tell you, you're not a power user, if you don't need the power that is now available. 2005's power user, maybe. But if you want to do video editing (and I mean final cut/premiere, not reencoding your dvd rips), play the latest games etc, then you do need that hardware. That software is designed to run on that hardware. And if you manage your own machine, whether it's for gaming of photoshop or whatever, you're going to care that this thing gives you bang for your buck. for what it's worth, this new chip isn't the fastest available. It isn't even close. It's the best value high-end chip, with a view to become even better value if you're open to overclocking it.
If you're not in that target audience, then fine - why do you complain about it? Do you bitch that lamborghinis are too expensive? "$150,000? I have a ford cortina that I got for $500 and it gets me to the mall just fine!". You don't see there is a market for this, because you are looking at a sample size of 1. Intel and AMD have a multi-billion business riding on this, I for one trust they're going to have done their homework.
(And I'm interested in the chip too - I'm planning a system upgrade soon - first since my Q6600 - and I like high-end, value chips I can overclock!)
I'm afraid you have it backwards - you are saying above that any tablet with Windows 7 must fail. Neither the OS nor, crucially, the market are mature, there will be a lot to come yet.
I gave the points that made the iPad successful - the OS was not important except, obviously, that it is a GOOD OS for the purpose.
You may think Windows 7 does not have the potential to be a good tablet OS - I am not defending it but simply pointing out that given there have been no windows tablets launched on a similar magnitude, that we can't know. The market is so immature - hell, the iPad isn't even released in this country until later this week, how can anyone know how it will end?
This is absolutely disingenuous. Are you saying the only reason the iPad succeeded was that it didn't have Win7 on it?
I mean, if you're operating at that level, you may as well say the iPad succeeded because it was a different colour. Just because they have one thing in common, does not mean that's the reason. Sheesh, never heard of correlation versus causation?
The iPad is successful because:
- it had the Apple hype machine behind it
- sleek, thin design
- large established app base
- good multi-touch screen
- low price point (compared to other slates, at least, and definitely lower than people were anticipating from Apple)
It was nothing to do with Windows 7. Hell, if the iPad DID run Windows 7 and gave a comparable experience, it would still have sold well, for the reasons above.
Just because the iPad worked as a slate, does that mean nothing else can work as a slate?
Surely, the iPhone working didn't mean the blackberry, treo or anything else didn't work.
I'd need a better reason for Windows 7 (or any other OS) being unsuitable for slates, than just "because the iPad already did it".
Personally, I want a full OS, proper processor and the ability to install any application, before I acquire a slate style computer.
That's another month for Episode 3.
Thanks a lot buddy! >:|
As long as one of them doesn't have extremely small tits, or they'll be deemed illegal.
"The article notes that LimeWire is used by nearly 60 percent of the people who download songs."
I take it the article was written before the suit was filed then, sometime around 2003?
And all of a sudden, you realise that EVERY car dealership in town has small print saying "...and if you buy this car, we can fuck you in the ass."
Well, you don't like being fucked in the ass. But there are only 3 car dealerships available to you, and they all have this small print in it. And you really need a car.
So what do you do?
Block all content from the server they're using to advertise their spam?
I work in IT for a government department that is still using IE6 as well. We are actually transitioning to IE8 this very month, the standard laptop/desktop build is being overhauled.
So, these things take a lot of time, but they do get done.
Yee haw.
What steps/actions are you going to take, to ensure the UK Pirate Party can emulate the success of the swedish Pirate Party? Have you been in touch with them to discuss their approach, how they gained exposure, and how they managed to rally so many voters to their cause?
Good luck!
Would you mind elaborating on how you'd go about making it fast and reliable for $1K?
Not that I think it can't be done, I think the solution as it is IS reliable, and medium speed, but if you think it can be done better, I'd be interested to hear how.
They announced a few months ago, that all Virgin media's customers will have new boxes with software provided by TiVo, from 2010. That's currently around 4 million customers.
http://www.techradar.com/news/television/virgin-media-bringing-tivo-back-to-uk-653858
Not sure how this ties up with Virgin's general plans, to roll out faster fiber nationwide. I can't see the point of a PVR when you have enough bandwidth to stream anything on demand.
I know that when I have a cold, it FEELS like 8% of my body weight is in snot. Now I know for sure. :/
I work for an organisation that has a private email system (private as in hardware, network lines). SPF works fine on that, though is also redundant. However, the network is accessible to other networks (ie the internet, as in, people can send mail to regular mail addresses, and vice versa), and SPF breaks here.
Due to the jump to the network, the "sender" is always the provider who handles said connectivity, where our area of the private network touches the internet. Thus we've had to completely disable SPF as it always comes back with negative results.
A good idea in principle, but fails when the two mail servers cannot immediately talk to one another. You'd need something like a validation chain to allow that scenario to work.
I remember, before TBC came out, trying to level alts to 5 in under 1 hour. That wasn't too hard, I got it down to about 40 minutes then. Last new character I made was a blood elf, and while I didn't stick around to 10, it was a lot quicker, I remember noticing.
This is a pity as a lot of the early quests, area atmospheres and monsters set the scene for the next progressions. The difference between each starter set, in every race on every faction, made for compelling play and in my opinion was the best part of the game in many cases. It's certainly what held people's interest while they got hooked, so it had to have been doing something right. It'll be a pity to miss that great experience.
Good point, and it would be good if it was so - I think it would still be hard. When I played a year-18 months ago, and was levelling alts, I often couldn't find a single person who wanted to do some of the more obscure ones, for hours on end - Razorfen, anyone?
Any changes to levels below 10 are inconsequential, that's about 3 hours of playtime. Removing the dazing effect and increasing regeneration just helps out new players, and i presume Blizzard is trying to recruit new players/subscriptions rather than just alts.
The meeting stone level requirement is effectively a nod toward boosting - given that low levels go past so quickly now, it's actually quite difficult to find a proper party for a mid level dungeon like maraudon, uldaman or that sort of thing. I guess Blizzard think it better that a new player get boosted through there, rather than miss it altogether.
Damn, I miss when you could get a full party for Scarlet monastery, though. Everything goes fine for the first 2 wings, then the leader switches on master looter for the tabard and hearths out - everyone else ragequits or goes to stormwind and badmouths him. Okay maybe I don't miss that so much.
If you want to play at 60FPS, run it on any hardware released in the last 5 years.
I ran it on a *laptop* from 2002, and it was still playable. Running it on an nVidia 6800 (launched early 2004), it pegged a solid 60FPS in all but the craziest raids.
Thinking you need a 4Ghz CPU to run WoW is ridiculous. Hell, you can probably buy a graphics card that runs it for less than the game itself.
> There is a lot of damage you can do to a minor that does not involve sex, and it's about time adults were responsible to what they knowingly say to minors.
No, it's about time that the child's parents/legal guardians were responsible for what the child is doing, giving them guidance about the world, and shielding them for what they are not prepared for. The internet and everyone else on it is NOT a suitable babysitter for a child, nor should they be expected to be accountable for someone else's poor parenting.
Would you sue a library because a kid left unattanded there picked up some traumatising sexual or horror content from the bookshelves?
This is a huge step backward making the terms of the law incredibly VAGUE, and making much normal, moral and legal behaviour illegal.